Yes, we’ve made it to the end of another successful Spectrum Scale user group! This year has been our most highly attended group with over 110 registrations and around a 90% attendance rate. We had representation from 56 organisations and delegates from 13 countries as well as 29 speakers over 28 sessions. A big thank you goes out to all our IBM, sponsor and user speakers.

For 2018, we headed back to London and the IBM Client Centre London on the South Bank. The client centre team rightly deserve our thanks – where nothing was too much trouble for them. Finding us cables to plug our streaming kit and generally making sure the logistics of the venue were all dealt with.

19th April

What a great start to new Spectrum Scale usergroups in Singapore, held at Supercomputing Asia at Resorts World Convention Centre.
There were a range of attendees, from private and public organisations, from Managing Directors to HPC Specialists and System Administrators, attending from countries pan-Asia-Pacific – India to China and Japan, to New Zealand and Australia.

As the conference theme and stream included AI and Data Analytics and Machine Learning, we had quite a few developers and sys admins who run various analytics workload on scale, but are looking to see what is new.

We’ve been talking with product management about the RFE process and have agreed that we’ll try out a community-voting process.

First up, we are piloting this idea, hopefully it will work out, but it may also need tweaks as we move forward.

One of the things we’ve been asking for is for a better way for the Spectrum Scale user group community to vote on RFEs. Sure we get people posting to the list, but we’re looking at if we can make it a better/more formal process to support this. Talking with IBM, we also recognise that with a large number of RFEs, it can be difficult for them to track work tasks being completed, but with the community RFEs, there is a commitment to try and track them closely and report back on progress later in the year.